Winner: Best IMGD MQP 2010 Selected: Boston Indie Showcase @ Pax East 2011
Crystals power force fields, blocking the player's path
Overview
For Blinding Silence, I began as a technical artist, but I eventually branched out to work on all aspects of the game. My responsibilities included:
Helping to design the core game mechanics, as well as the art style
Designing and implementing the shaders and lighting to achieve the desired look of the game
Designing a pipeline to allow for easy level creation and asset integration through Maya
Assembling a motion capture facility, and generating over 20 animations
Creating models and other game assets, as well as integration of all assets
Designing and building all levels
Scripting and recording all voice-acting
Details
Blinding Silence is a 'sound based puzzle game', and was created as a Major Qualifying Project at WPI by a team of 4 students. In the game, the player takes on the role of a blind man who can see sound. The player uses objects in the world to generate sounds that can change the behavior of AI actors, providing a unique puzzle-solving environment. The game implements a novel control scheme, utilizing wii-remote controllers and optical head-tracking. The team project was completed in April of 2010, winning the Provost's Award for Best IMGD MQP of 2010.
I later revisited it in the fall of 2010 to revamp and polish the game, which eventually went on to be selected for the Boston Indie Showcase at Pax East 2011.
Motion Capture
The HIVE lab at WPI has a set of optical motion capture equipment that had been sitting idle for some time. When it became evident that Blinding Silence would require a large number of high quality animations, I decided to take initiative and setup the system for use by our team. The space that was available for this project had low ceilings and a limited mounting area, requiring many iterations of testing before I found a setup that produced usable data. I scheduled an improv actor to come in and perform the motion, and then spent the next several weeks learning Motion Builder and cleaning the data into usable animations. The video above shows a selection of the best animations produced by this process.
